This report focuses on how companies around the world, and especially in the US, can make their trade promotions more effective. View Summary

This report focuses on how companies around the world, and especially in the US, can make their trade promotions more effective.

The consumer product landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented, resulting in retailers and manufacturers offering various promotion options that often lead to losses rather than gains.

Over the past ten years, companies around the globe have doubled the amount of money they spend on trade promotions, however, while they can increase product visibility and brand awareness, in the US more than two-thirds of trade promotions don't break even.

The report identifies the main causes of trade promotion inefficiencies and how to overcome them.

This article explains how Boots, the UK beauty and personal care retailer, used online surveys to understand how much more consumers are willing to pay for better quality service and in-store experiences. View Summary

This article explains how Boots, the UK beauty and personal care retailer, used online surveys to understand how much more consumers are willing to pay for better quality service and in-store experiences.

Boots sells a wide range of product categories with many unique buying behaviours and needed to understand purchasing motivations in-depth across categories.

It particularly wanted to understand the trade-off people are willing to make between a superior shopping experience and price, and how its prices stacked up against quality perceptions.

An online survey was fielded to people using Boots' loyalty scheme, with survey design and subsequent analysis allowing Boots to understand how consumers choose where to shop.

This helped Boots optimise its range, more effectively prioritise training budgets and introduce new pricing strategies.

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Navigating the customer journey: Don't forget the category and think small as well as big

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Research on Warc, Kantar Worldpanel, June 2014

This article examines the state of the UK grocery sector and suggests ways to improve the customer experience for different types of shopper. View Summary

This article examines the state of the UK grocery sector and suggests ways to improve the customer experience for different types of shopper.

The UK grocery sector is becoming increasingly polarised, so retailers in the middle ground need to find new ways to improve the customer experience in order to stand out.

The type of experience shoppers expect is dependent on the type of product they are buying and can be divided into five categories: Fast Find, Restock and Save, Classic Restock, Meal Solver, Treat.

The article suggests ways to meet shoppers in these different modes, such as improving promotional offers by making it easy to compare prices across products, or suggesting recipes specific to different products.

4

Natural partners bring unexpected bonuses

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Rory Sutherland, Market Leader, Quarter 3, 2011, pp. 58-58

Rory Sutherland considers the principle of complementarity, which though powerful, often works at the category level, not at the brand level. View Summary

Rory Sutherland considers the principle of complementarity, which though powerful, often works at the category level, not at the brand level. Ice and Coke would be described by economists as 'complementary goods' - or goods with a 'negative cross-elasticity of demand', meaning that a fall in price of one good will increase demand for the other. Supermarkets could give more thought to expanding this linked notion. For example, why is sugar, including sugar lumps, stocked next to baking goods, rather near tea and coffee? But, more important, is too much thought devoted to brand-level questions, leaving little attention spare for category-based interventions?

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Getting into the Real World of the Shopper: Using Eye Tracking in a Multi Modal Research Approach

Rogil's innovative Sens-Pack model combines eye tracking with verbal quantitative and qualitative research techniques which enables the prediction of the success of your packaging or category management. View Summary

Rogil's innovative Sens-Pack model combines eye tracking with verbal quantitative and qualitative research techniques which enables the prediction of the success of your packaging or category management. In this presentation we will prove that the added value of this multi-mode research approach goes beyond conventional research techniques.

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Consumer research: When less is more

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Ged Parton, Admap, December 2010, pp. 42-43

Customer research using the MindCloud technique can reveal valuable insights into brands’ strengths and weaknesses. View Summary

Customer research using the MindCloud technique can reveal valuable insights into brands’ strengths and weaknesses. It is generally assumed that more distribution is always a good thing and that it makes the product or service in question more widely available and encourages and facilitates greater usage of their brands. In reality, this simple ‘truth’ hides a good deal of complexity. The article aims to demonstrate, through original commissioned research, that this complexity is important for marketers to understand. There are often negatives associated with the level of availability, ie some people respond badly to the ubiquity of a brand in a market. And what customers do is not only a function of what they want to do but also a matter of market factors.

The article argues against two marketing myths, uniqueness and table stakes. People buy a brand not because it is unique but because it delivers what they want a little better. View Summary

The article argues against two marketing myths, uniqueness and table stakes. People buy a brand not because it is unique but because it delivers what they want a little better. Most differentiations are irrelevant to most customers. Genuine differentiations are quickly copied. For example, Volvo is a clearly differentiated brand, but Toyota is far more valuable. A key task for marketing is to ensure that the brand promise is actually delivered throughout the organisation, and to be the voice of the customer within it. Being better is about customer relevance as much as great execution. Marketers need to: understand the reasons for customer dissatisfactions; explore customer-relevant ways of improving the offer; and uncover customers’ latent needs and dissatisfaction with the whole category.

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Innovation: brand it or lose it

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David Aaker, Market Leader, Issue 41, Summer 2008, pp. 20-24

Branding can help an organisation own an innovation, create and dominate a new subcategory and enhance the perceived effectiveness of the organisation. View Summary

Branding can help an organisation own an innovation, create and dominate a new subcategory and enhance the perceived effectiveness of the organisation. In this article, branding expert David Aaker argues that these benefits are often overlooked, and that branding decisions should be a fundamental part of the innovation strategy. This form of branding is not simply putting a name and logo on an innovation. Rather, it means that a brand is developed guided by a coherent brand strategy and supported over time by actively managed, adequately funded brand-building programmes. To merit a brand, the innovation needs to represent a significant advance, be valued by customers and merit investment over time.

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What's the future of category management?

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Stephen Needel, ESOMAR, Retail Conference, Valencia, February 2007

This paper argues that the category management initiative, as a whole, has not unfolded as was expected 15 years ago. View Summary

This paper argues that the category management initiative, as a whole, has not unfolded as was expected 15 years ago. With the benefit of hindsight, it is unlikely that it would proceed in such a fairytale fashion. The road to adoption of category management and the successful application of marketing, sales and research along that road is fraught with obstacles and roadblocks. The purpose of this paper is to discuss those roadblocks, both attempting to identify their causes and propose solutions.

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Optimal assortment and planogram development - research in category management

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Ian Addie, ESOMAR, Retail Conference, Valencia, February 2007

Adopting a reach optimising approach to category assortment development presents significant advantages over a simplistic volume based solution. View Summary

Adopting a reach optimising approach to category assortment development presents significant advantages over a simplistic volume based solution. In evaluating category reach, however, we must take into account both the purchase and consumption occasions of the shopper base. This can only effectively be done via primary research employing a direct substitution exercise.

The Chief Marketing Officer and Group VP, Personal Care, at Unilever describes how Unilever's structural reorganisation has improved global brand development. While operational implementation remains local, responsibility for brand development and generation of marketing ideas is now given to brand specialists in global innovation centres, who also control the global advertising budgets. Brand management is thus more effective and less chaotic, and the importance of marketing at a senior level is recognised. Areas discussed in the interview include: how research is used in developing advertising; the need to make advertising that is entertaining as well as informative, so that consumers want to watch it at a time when PVRs, etc., are making avoidance easier; the importance of tracking what consumers take out of the advertising (which may be very different from the perceptions put into it). Examples from various Unilever brands, especially Lynx and Dove and their recent campaigns.

Dominic Twose, Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, November 2005

This article summarises the WARC-published IPA report 'Driving Top-Line Growth', which analyses 52 winners from the last ten years of the IPA Effectiveness Awards. View Summary

This article summarises the WARC-published IPA report 'Driving Top-Line Growth', which analyses 52 winners from the last ten years of the IPA Effectiveness Awards. The report looks at brands which doubled their share, brands that increased profits by over £80 million and brands which increased volume sales by 70% while increasing price relative to the market. This summary sets out the report's 10 key findings about how to grow a brand.

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Marketers need to get out and get under their business models

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Tim Ambler, Market Leader, Issue 30, Autumn 2005, pp. 20-21

Argues that many marketing departments spend too much time contemplating what they have done (‘accountability’) or might do (‘approvals’) instead of actually doing it. View Summary

Argues that many marketing departments spend too much time contemplating what they have done (‘accountability’) or might do (‘approvals’) instead of actually doing it. Marketers should spend less time in the office, in planning meetings or digesting reports, and more time in the field trying out initiatives – which often have to be tried out before it can be seen whether they will work. Marketers need to test their business model – not just by measuring returns, but by understanding the links between marketing actions and customer behaviour, cash flow, etc. This can be partly done in the office (e.g. interrogating databases and old research), but some understanding needs to be gained out in the market. Success often comes from small-scale initiatives tried out without budgets or approvals. A research project at London Business School is studying how better-organised, more skilled marketing teams can get more value from the same money than some large marketing departments.

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Service with a snarl

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Simon Silvester, Market Leader, Issue 30, Autumn 2005, pp. 32-38

This provocative article argues that companies who promise high-quality service inevitably break that promise and lose their custom. View Summary

This provocative article argues that companies who promise high-quality service inevitably break that promise and lose their custom. The reason is simple: the cost of employing the staff who can provide the service rises faster than what customers pay for it. When a company fails to live up to its service promise, the brand can be quickly destroyed: evidence (e.g. from the Brand Asset Valuator) shows that product brands are stronger on all counts than service brands. The solution is to stop building your brand marketing on a promise of personal service. There are other things service companies can do: 1) promise what computers rather than people can do (e.g. internet banking, Amazon, frequent flyer schemes); 2) use tangible things (e.g. Vodafone, Orange); 3) promise exclusivity (e.g. Vidal Sassoon); 4) promise to save by not offering service (e.g. McDonalds, Ryanair); 5) talk about your philosophy (e.g. Body Shop).

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Magic and logic: bridging the marketing gap

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Charles Kirchner, Market Leader, Issue 30, Autumn 2005, pp. 61-62

Argues that marketing departments often fail to engage with (and be valued by) other parts of the organisation because they rely on the creative aspect of their work (the ‘magic’), and do not recognise and optimise their operational skills, which are equally needed (the ‘logic’). View Summary

Argues that marketing departments often fail to engage with (and be valued by) other parts of the organisation because they rely on the creative aspect of their work (the ‘magic’), and do not recognise and optimise their operational skills, which are equally needed (the ‘logic’). Marketing teams hired for their creative abilities may lack the skills to implement their ideas efficiently and without waste, yet that is often what they are assessed on. Marketers should recognise the difference between ‘magic’ and ‘logic’, make an effort to understand what drives operational excellence, and apply these principles. The key drivers include scale economies, cost control and maximising the efficiency of the supply chain. Improving operational efficiency, once understood, can result in very significant gains in cost reduction, speed and predictable delivery, and may well release extra funds for additional ‘magic’ to benefit the brand.

Describes Whitbread’s three-year Winning Brands programme covering its various service sector brands (Premier Travel Inn, TGI Friday’s, Beefeater, Costa Coffee and Marriott (no longer part of Whitbread)). This programme won the 2004 Marketing Society Award for Best Marketing Capability Programme. Winning Brands is based on a ‘tight–loose’ approach – tight to ensure consistency of brand experience across multiple channels, but loose enough to give front-line staff freedom to respond to customers and innovate, so that each brand experience is as unique and personal as possible. Describes the structured approach adopted, its aims, how it operated through a series of masterclasses, the tangible and intangible benefits resulting. Five core principles of service branding are proposed.

17

Why everything gets worse before it gets better

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Brian Millar, Market Leader, Issue 30, Autumn 2005, pp. 48-52

Argues that marketers are wrong to believe (as they do) that products in their markets are always getting better. View Summary

Argues that marketers are wrong to believe (as they do) that products in their markets are always getting better. On the contrary, as soon as a product becomes mass-market, it declines in quality and goes through a long cycle of deterioration before the curve bottoms out. This happens because consumers always choose convenience rather than performance. Eventually the curve starts to rise back towards the ‘elite’ level when a new brand sees an opportunity to outbid its rivals by improving quality but still in the mass market. Examples described: fast food restaurants, coffee, recorded music (which has not bottomed out yet). Marketers need to understand at what point on this curve their brand has ‘dropped anchor’, because that will determine its image. Examples of brand stuck at the bottom (McDonalds, Kraft) and on the upswing (Ikea, Volkswagen). Using Prof. Kano’s strategies (doing what you do better, doing the unexpected to delight your customers) may not be enough to get you back up the curve if you are stuck at the wrong point on it. Timing is vital. If the curve is still heading downwards, changing your existing product may do no good: you may need a separate high-end offering, even through acquisition (as with Volkswagen’s purchase of Bentley). But be ready for when the curve will eventually turn up.

The possibility of using a simple, single measure of brand potential across different markets that is both conceptually meaningful and of value to management is presented. View Summary

The possibility of using a simple, single measure of brand potential across different markets that is both conceptually meaningful and of value to management is presented. Building on the Dick and Basu grid, the value of establishing whether a brand exhibits brand equity surplus, deficit or balance is described. The insights that can be gleaned from a single source study with the comparison of share of mind (attitude) with market share (behaviour) and the accompanying diagnostic analysis are explored. The approach has supporting validations across North America and Europe. The value to marketers in terms of brand diagnosis, prognosis and recommended ‘treatment’ is described using two case studies.

Refutes as a myth the widespread marketing belief that brands in a category lack differentiation in functional performance, and therefore depend wholly on the emotional elements in branding to create distinctiveness. View Summary

Refutes as a myth the widespread marketing belief that brands in a category lack differentiation in functional performance, and therefore depend wholly on the emotional elements in branding to create distinctiveness. Recent research (Research International’s tenth ROI study) is quoted to show that people experience brands first and foremost in a sensory way. Great brand relationships begin with direct and powerful experience of the product itself; successful designers focus intensively on observation of product experience and behaviour. The brand’s function is to act as amplifier of the product experience. Various strategies for putting product experience at the centre of the brand promise are described: sensory touchpoints, authenticity, storytelling (examples given for each).

20

Measuring marketing: six ways to do it better

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Sir Andrew Likierman, Market Leader, Issue 30, Autumn 2005, pp. 53-55

Offers suggestions to help marketers in the difficult process of measurement for accountability. First, it is essential to realise, and admit, that not everything is possible: included here are issues about the boundaries of marketing, measurement problems, and what the marketing function should take responsibility for. View Summary

Offers suggestions to help marketers in the difficult process of measurement for accountability. First, it is essential to realise, and admit, that not everything is possible: included here are issues about the boundaries of marketing, measurement problems, and what the marketing function should take responsibility for. In this context, six ways are suggested to improve the measurement process: 1) ensure performance is linked to the organisation’s objectives; 2) improve the sophistication of measures and their use (including getting more out of old data); 3) give priority to consistency of data over time; 4) use comparisons where possible; 5) improve feedback quality, especially face-to-face from colleagues; 6) admit limitations openly.

21

Keeping cool

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Ken Nicolson, ANA Magazine, August 2005, pp. 14-16

Argues the case for companies to use Marketing Resource Management (MRM) software to help achieve marketing accountability. View Summary

Argues the case for companies to use Marketing Resource Management (MRM) software to help achieve marketing accountability. MRM comprises three types of marketing solutions: to drive marketing efficiencies, to stimulate demand through direct marketing, and to improve the effectiveness of marketing allocations. Most companies are not yet using this software although it is available (reasons why discussed). Marketers need sophisticated analytical techniques and tools which are beyond the scope of traditional business intelligence tools (reasons discussed). Continuous discipline is required to keep updating the analysis of marketing investment for the continuous reallocation of expenditure to achieve the best return: it needs top-level (CEO or finance) mandating. Methodologies and software include: data acquisition and management, measurement and analysis technology, effectiveness testing against targets, efficiency (impact of investments related to cost), marginal rate of return.

Offers thirteen guidelines for successful brainstorming within companies (meetings for generating new ideas). It is essential to plan, prepare and conduct this operation correctly; if not, it can damage morale and waste time. Done properly, it be both effective and fun.

Discusses the increasing involvement of advertisers' procurement and strategic sourcing departments in producing advertising. Although advertisers' marketing departments as well as agencies often dislike the constraints imposed, they are increasingly resigned to working with them (the shift driven by the need for accountability and Sarbanes-Oxley). Article reports a survey by the ANA of marketers and their procurement counterparts. This showed up the division in attitude between the two functions, based on misperceptions, e.g.: marketers believe that procurement people do not understand marketing; procurement people believe that marketers see them simply as applying rigid rules and always looking for the cheapest option. Procurement people see their future involvement in marketing as much greater than the marketers do. However, there is evidence that marketers do see procurement as valuable and helpful, and several companies (named) have the two functions working well together. Bridging the gap involves clarifying the role of procurement, establishing best practices, and improved communication and education. The ANA have produced a booklet: Marketing Communications Procurement: building value through best practices.

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Death to inefficiency and waste

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Cynthia Del Rosario, ANA Magazine, August 2005, pp. 40-41

Describes Ad-ID, a Web-based system developed by the AAAA and ANA to build a universal standard for the advertising industry. View Summary

Describes Ad-ID, a Web-based system developed by the AAAA and ANA to build a universal standard for the advertising industry. It is like a barcode which uniquely identifies every advertising asset a company creates (e.g. TV and radio spot, print execution, etc.). Ad-ID streamlines the marketing supply chain process by enabling unlimited authorised users to enter the site at any time. This eliminates part of the rekeying process that happens when orders are placed. It thus speeds up the ordering process, gives the advertiser more control, saves time and reduces waste and human error. The Ad-ID universal standard creates a common language for advertisers, agencies and the media.

Describes how Orange monitors its global brand positioning, comparing consumer perceptions with performance in each country. Reasons for valuing brands are summarised: not just for accountancy but also to justify expenditure and as a management tool. Importance of agreeing common definitions in each country, e.g. how to define consumer segments. One can then evaluate the situation in each country: the competition, what services people are buying, etc., and present solutions. Top-of-mind and first-choice mentions are found to correlate strongly with market performance (spontaneous awareness does not). How key metrics on perception and performance are extracted and summarised for the board is illustrated. Since customer perceptions drive profitability, it is crucial to monitor these and present results in a manageable and accessible form that points clearly to the right action.